Friday, October 30, 2015

Answering a Critique of Edward Said

Edward Said, it turned out, was a Palestinian Arab in the US.
It should not have mattered, given the lofty ideals of that country.
But it did.
This would invariably give a feeling of loneliness to any one.
Said too felt it.
And then he talked about it.
But he talked about it in a manner that was robust and hence unassailable.
Clearly the representatives of the cultural hegemony would not appreciate that.
They did not.
Unfortunately for them there was little they could do.

Then there are some who resorted to sheer lying, after a decade of Said's demise.

Here is one such attempt at lying.

My remarks, in the material below, are after the quotations from the original critique.

Enough Said: The False Scholarship of Edward Said

 

  Columbia University’s English Department may seem a surprising place from which to move the world, but this is what Professor Edward Said accomplished. He not only transformed the West’s perception of the Israel-Arab conflict, he also led the way toward a new, post-socialist life for leftism in which the proletariat was replaced by “people of color” as the redeemers of humankind. During the ten years that have passed since his death there have been no signs that his extraordinary influence is diminishing.

Said might be accused of post-colonialism and post-leftism accusation is unfair. His focus was on Islamophobic, orientalist branch of racism and that is it. To introduce extra parameters into the discourse will betray various levels of academic failing on part of the critique.

To complain against undiminished influence of said is plain jealousy. The normal course for a healthy society is to make amends regarding the issues in which it was found to be failing.

To take up issues along the lines that this critique does amounts to lack of courage in regards to a monumental failing of western society, European to begin with and finally American.

 According to a 2005 search on the utility “Syllabus finder,” Said’s books were assigned as reading in eight hundred and sixty-eight courses in American colleges and universities (counting only courses whose syllabi were available online). These ranged across literary criticism, politics, anthropology, Middle East studies, and other disciplines including postcolonial studies, a field widely credited with having grown out of Said’s work. More than forty books have been published about him, including even a few critical ones, but mostly adulatory, such as The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said, published seven years after his death of leukemia in 2003. Georgetown University, UCLA, and other schools offer courses about him. A 2001 review for the Guardian called him “arguably the most influential intellectual of our time.”
 One can only thank the critique for bringing this monumental adulation to the fore.

The book that made Edward Said famous was Orientalism, published in 1978 when he was forty-three. Said’s objective was to expose the worm at the core of Western civilization, namely, its inability to define itself except over and against an imagined “other.” That “other” was the Oriental, a figure “to be feared . . . or to be controlled.” Ergo, Said claimed that “every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was . . . a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.” Elsewhere in the text he made clear that what was true for Europeans held equally for Americans.
True again. And again a nice summary of the effects of Said's scholarship. The things he said will look sweeping in nature but he did assert the same. He was not apologetic about it. That his assertions look incredible and vertiginous is an indication of dual kind - Said's courage and the sheer amount of injustice in the western approach towards the orient.

This echoed a theme of 1960s radicalism that was forged in the movements against Jim Crow and against America’s war in Vietnam, namely that the Caucasian race was the scourge of humanity. Rather than shout this accusation from a soapbox, as others had done, Said delivered it in tones that awed readers with erudition. The names of abstruse contemporary theoreticians and obscure bygone academicians rolled off pages strewn with words that sent readers scurrying to their dictionaries. Never mind that some of these words could not be found in dictionaries (“paradeutic”) or that some were misused (“eschatological” where “scatological” was the intended meaning); never mind that some of the citations were pretentious (“the names of Levi-Strauss, Gramsci, and Michel Foucault drop with a dull thud,” commented historian J. H. Plumb, reviewing the book for the New York Times”)—never mind any of this, the important point that evoked frissons of pleasure and excitement was that here was a “person of color” delivering a withering condemnation of the white man and, so to speak, beating him at his own game of intellectual elegance.
Finally the critique commits to something and says something assertive.
Let us get a few things right. Americans did behave as scourge of Vietnam. There is no doubt about it. In the context of the so called orient said did not examine the scourge angle so there is no point in making that analogy. That orientalism is debilitating, overarching, dominating, intimidating, inimical and so on - that said did talk about and he did so with evidence. It was all academic and for all to see. He assiduously avoided the ground effects of orientalism - the west simply can not take that responsibility. Just for example who would be held responsible for Sikh-Muslim massacres at the time of partition of India?

And pray if Said awed his audience with his erudition and beat the western intelligentsia at their own game should that be held against him?

If references to "abstruse contemporary theoreticians and obscure bygone academicians" is so bothersome then what about leaving the discourse to competent people? Said's fault was that he scrambled the most potent concepts against a formidable discourse and succeeded at it. So far the criticism is the one of a loser.

Then if you do not find a word in one dictionary then you go for another one. Said was a man from philology and anyone approaching him must be prepared to the fact that his inventory of arms will be formidable.

Then only people of bad faith bicker about typos like “eschatological” in place of “scatological".

 The complain about Levi-Strauss, Gramsci, and Michel Foucault too is silly. Old and contemporary sociological concepts help academicians to put the things in perspective and Said helped them. If someone can not fathom these concepts then he should engage himself in other pastimes while complaining about them after understanding betrays worse - lack of integrity. The so called orient has been mishandled for so long and when she confronted it was pooh-poohed and now when the confrontation is water tight then this complain about obscurity. One comes only to one unmistakable conclusion - orientalist game is up. Tough rather late but the writing is finally on the wall.

 In truth, Said was an unlikely symbol of the wretched of the earth. His father, who called himself William, had emigrated from Jerusalem (a place he hated, according to Edward) to America in 1911, served in World War I, and become a US citizen. Reluctantly yielding to family pressures, he returned to the Middle East in the 1920s and settled in Cairo, where he made his fortune in business and married an Egyptian woman. Edward, their eldest after a first-born had perished in infancy, was told he was named after the Prince of Wales. He and his four sisters were reared in the Protestant church and in relative opulence, with a box at the opera, membership in country clubs, and piano lessons. They were educated at British and American primary and secondary schools in Cairo until Edward was sent to an elite New England prep school at fifteen, then to Princeton. After graduate studies at Harvard, he began to teach literary criticism, rising to the award of an endowed chair at Columbia by the time he was forty and later to the rank of university professor, Columbia’s highest faculty title.
In the 1995 printing of Orientalism Edward Said wrote an Afterword. There he looks irked at those people who thought of Oruientalism as some sort of the Wretched of the Earth analysis as was done by Franz Fanon.

 A year after Orientalism sent his personal stock soaring, Said published The Question of Palestine. Fifteen years earlier, the Palestine Liberation Organization had been founded in the effort to consecrate a distinctive Palestinian identity, and the announcement of that identity to the world had mostly taken the form of spectacular acts of terror whose purpose was in large measure to draw attention to Palestinian grievances. Now, Columbia University’s Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature gave the Palestinian cause a dramatically different face.
Someone's freedom fighter is someone else's terrorist. Said argued from Palestinian point of view. Any objective reader can see for herself which view makes more sense. Unfortunately US view can not be taken as objective or unbiased for they in US have been so thoroughly brain washed that any criticism of Israel and its policies towards Palestinian people is either not heard and once you do manage to say your view then you will face the music for the US as well as the Zionist lobby is sure to damn you as anti-Semitic.

He brought authenticity to this task because of his origins and authority because of his membership in the Palestinian National Council, the nominal governing body of the PLO. Assuring his readers that the PLO had, since its bombings and hijackings in the early 1970s, “avoided and condemned terror,” presenting PLO leader Yasir Arafat as “a much misunderstood and maligned political personality,” and asserting his own belief in a Palestinian state alongside—rather than in place of—Israel, Said argued in behalf of “a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.” This was so compelling as to sweep up New York Times reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who wrote: “So logically and eloquently does Professor Said make [his] case, that one momentarily forgets the many countervailing arguments posed by the Israelis.”
This paragraph is both motivated as well as loaded. It would have looked like a summary of status of the issue under consideration but in view of the bias of the critique  it serves only one duplicitous purpose - Said is not reliable because he is using his reliability in favour of the cause of Palastine.

These two books—Orientalism and The Question of Palestine—each of which was followed by various sequels and elaborations, established the twin pillars of Said’s career as the avenging voice of the Palestinians against Israel, and more broadly of the Arabs, Muslims, and other “Orientals” against the West as a whole.
An avenger is a negative avtar for Said. He simply argued the Palestinian cause. To satisfy the blood thirst of the enemies of Palestine he even admitted as being a partisan for Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians.

Palestine atrocity because of Zionists might be some 68 years old but orientalism is about two hundred and fifty years old. Mostly the intellectuals of the society that perpetrated above atrocities knew that their game was long up and hence the disappearance of orientalism at the literary level. But stray supporters, like the present critique, still remain there.

Said rolled American racism and European colonialism into one mélange of white oppression of darker-skinned peoples. He was not the only thinker to have forged this amalgam, but his unique further contribution was to represent “Orientals” as the epitome of the dark-skinned; Muslims as the modal Orientals; Arabs as the essential Muslims; and, finally, Palestinians as the ultimate Arabs. Abracadabra—Israel was transformed from a redemptive refuge from two thousand years of persecution to the very embodiment of white supremacy.
This is excessive perfidy, subterfuge and deception.

What Said did was to extract the pure academic content from the history of colonialism, that irrefutable core of the western attitudes towards the orientals. After that the west has no escape from their responsibilities in creation and maintenance of orientalism including its extension in the form of racism in US and their support for Israeli policies.

There was one final step in this progression: Edward Said as the emblematic Palestinian. From the time he came into the public eye, Said presented himself as an “exile” who had been born and raised in Jerusalem until forced from there at age twelve by the Jews. A sympathetic writer in the Guardian put it: “His evocation of his own experience of exile has led many of his readers in the west to see him as the embodiment of the Palestinian tragedy.” Indeed, he wrote and narrated a 1998 BBC documentary, In Search of Palestine, which presented his personal story as a microcosm of this ongoing Nakba (or catastrophe, as Palestinians call the birth of Israel).
This is ad hominem.

The exile said referred to is the feeling of loneliness in US for a coloured person, specifically an Arab, even if a Christian. It was very noble of him to take up the Palestinian cause and make unity with their cause. To accuse him of opportunism is at best a wrong representation of the reality.

But in September 1999, Commentary published an investigative article by Justus Reid Weiner presenting evidence that Said had largely falsified his background. A trove of documents showed that until he moved to the United States to attend prep school in 1951, Said had resided his entire life in Cairo, not Palestine. A few months later, Said published his autobiography, which confirmed this charge without acknowledging or making any attempt to explain the earlier contrary claims that he had made in discussing his background.

In reaction to the exposé, Said and several of his supporters unleashed a ferocious assault on Weiner. Said sneered that “because he is relatively unknown, Weiner tries to make a name for himself by attacking a better known person’s reputation.” And eleven ideological soul mates of Said’s, styling themselves “The Arab-Jewish Peace Group,” co-signed a letter to the editor that likened Weiner’s article to “deny[ing] the Holocaust.”

Much of the debate between Weiner and Said revolved around the house in which Said was born and that viewers of his BBC documentary were given to understand was the home where he had grown up. Weiner showed from tax and land registry documents that the house never belonged to Said’s father but rather to his aunt. In his rebuttal, Said had written somewhat implausibly: “The family house was indeed a family house in the Arab sense,” meaning that in the eyes of the extended family it belonged to them all even if the official records showed it to be the property only of Edward’s aunt and her offspring.
These are three paragraphs in an article that are ad hominem in character and discuss a single issue - Weiner's calumny against Said. It is sufficient to say that Christopher Hitchens, no Islamophile, called Weiner's article an act of extraordinary mendacity.

 Said’s cynical modus operandi was to stop short, where possible, of telling an outright lie while deliberately leaving a false impression. Even so, he did not always avoid crossing the line or dancing so close to it that whether his words should be labeled a lie or merely a deception amounted to a difference without a distinction. “I have never claimed to have been made a refugee, but rather that my extended family . . . in fact was,” he wrote in response to Weiner. But what was a reader supposed to have inferred from his book, The Pen and the Sword, where he had spoken of his “recollections of . . . the first twelve or thirteen years of my life before I left Palestine?” Or from the article, in the London Review of Books, where he had written: “I was born in Jerusalem and spent most of my formative years there and, after 1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt?”

This is the paragraph that makes the article worthy of refutation and that too not because of its veracity but the nature of sabotage involved in it. To represent reality in a deliberately insinuating manner so as to create a false impression without resorting to outright lies is the forte of orientalist writing. In above paragraph the present critique has tried to slap the same charges on Said that latter tried to establish against the orientalists. What said wrote is there in open and what orientalits wrote is there in public view. The instances present author mentions simply do not prove the case he is trying to make.

It may be that Said, as he claimed, “scrupulously” recounted his life in his autobiography where at last the true facts of his education and residence emerge. But, as his critics continued to ask, does finally telling his story truthfully wipe away twenty years of lying about it? In the end, Said downplayed the matter. In a late interview with the New York Times he said: “I don’t think it’s that important, in any case. . . . I never have represented my case as the issue to be treated. I’ve represented the case of my people.”
At this juncture two issues need attention. The sheer tenacity to continue along the ad hominem lines. Joshua Muravchik who? Either he is terribly disconnected from reality or the current US reality has become so devoid of integrity that their academic reputation has been completely run down. We hope that it is he who is not aware of the fact that he is dragging his own reputation into mud.


Second issue concerns the same issue but at a moral level. To call someone a liar at point blank level is bad manners. Yet lies of the the present critic as well as those of Weiner have to be pointed out point blank for they both have used that as a weapon. Clearly this process can not be elongated ad infinitum. Academic value of both Muravchik and Weiner are nil.

What was important, however, was the light shed on Said’s disingenuous and misleading methods, becasue they also turn out to be the foundation of his scholarly work. The intellectual deceit was especially obvious in his most important book, Orientalism. Its central idea is that Western imperial conquest of Asia and North Africa was entwined with the study and depiction of the native societies, which inevitably entailed misrepresenting and denigrating them.
The critic makes a vitriolic accusation but fails to provide the evidence. The attempt is Goebbelsian.
Said explained: “Knowledge of subject races or Orientals is what makes their management easy and profitable; knowledge gives power, more power requires more knowledge, and so on in an increasingly profitable dialectic of information and control.”

The archetype of those who provided this knowledge was the “Orientalist,” a formal designation for those scholars, most of them Europeans, whose specialties were the languages, culture, history, and sociology of societies of the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. However, Said explained that he used the term even more broadly to indicate a “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”
 This is true. Said said this. This is also an accurate diagnosis. Knowledge not as a source of freedom but as a source of control over the orient. Readers please beware of a quote within a quote in the next paragraph.
Orientalism, he said, embodied “dogmas” that “exist . . . in their purest form today in studies of the Arabs and Islam.” He identified the four “principal” ones as these:
one is the absolute and systematic difference between the West, which is rational, developed, humane, superior, and the Orient, which is aberrant, undeveloped, inferior. Another dogma is that abstractions about the Orient . . . are always preferable to direct evidence drawn from modern Oriental realities. A third dogma is that the Orient is eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself . . . A fourth dogma is that the Orient is at bottom something either to be feared . . . or to be controlled.
This all is there in Said's original book.
Initial reviews of the book, often by specialists, were mixed, but it appeared at a time when “multiculturalism” was becoming the new dogma of the intellectual elites and took on a life of its own, eventually being translated into more than three dozen languages and becoming one of the most influential and widely assigned texts of the latter part of the twentieth century.
The critic leaves out a few points. He has already mentioned the wide spread acceptance of the book as a reading material. This is a tribute to the accuracy of the analysis by said. But the critic doesn't forget to mention mixed nature of reviews. This overplays the mixed part. It really does. The response to the book was of critical acclaim, of silence as well as stupefaction.  Critical acclaim because his case was not only compelling but decisive, as one reviewer put it. Silence was because of the stark nature of the conclusion. This was the proverbial bump in the carpet when you keep sweeping the dirt under it, the elephant in the drawing room that Said had put the under spot light. No wonder from silence the book went straight to university syllabus. Finally stupefaction too was a reaction for some of the people who simply could not fathom the import of the book called it anti-west thereby exposing their pathetic limitations in assimilating the Saidian narrative.
Critics pointed out a variety of errors in Orientalism, starting with bloopers that suggested Said’s grasp of Middle Eastern history was shaky. Said claimed that “Britain and France dominated the Eastern Mediterranean from about the end of the seventeenth century on,” whereas for another hundred years it was the Ottomans who ruled that area. He had written that the Muslim conquest of Turkey preceded that of North Africa, but in reality it followed by about four hundred years. And he had referred to British “colonial administrators” of Pakistan whereas Pakistan was formed in the wake of decolonization.
The European colonial push was not a single day affair. The critic himself got to revise the Gulf history. And what is that silly bickering about Pakistan?
More serious still was his lack of scruple in the use of sources.
He admits that he has been toying with trifles.
Anthropologist Daniel Martin Varisco, who actually agreed with Said on many ideological issues, observed in his book Reading Orientalism that “one of Said’s rhetorical means for a polemical end is to partially . . . quote a phrase while judiciously neglecting words that would qualify and at times refute what the phrase alone might imply.”
Said was just accused of  falsification by misrepresentation. Let us see whether this one holds water.
He offered as an example of this duplicitous method Said’s use of two quotes from the writings of Sania Hamady, an Arab-American who wrote critically of Arabs. The quotes put her in a bad light, but both times, says Varisco, they were taken from passages where Hamady is merely summarizing someone else’s view, not giving her own. In the same vein, John Rodenbeck, a professor of comparative literature at the American University of Cairo, found that Said’s “persistent misconstruction and misquotation of [the nineteenth century Orientalist Edward] Lane’s words are so clearly willful that they suggest . . . bad faith.”
Did Hamady overcome colonial bias? Apparently someone called Rodenbeck proved that lane, a prototypical orientalist, was not an orientalist!  Orientalism consists of layers upon layers of inaccurate representation and biased views. Said opened all these layers. The poor guinea pigs simply got caught in the whirlwind of that deconstruction. Basically when a western is praising the orient people like present critic as well as the people he quotes in above paragraph would like us to believe that at face value. The reality, most of the time, is that the western is simply posing a facade of fairness and his real agenda is to peddle his own magnanimity. Said ruthlessly exposed this duplicity. That Varisco, Rodenbeck present critic should be calling said duplicitous is pathetic at best. Their slip is showing.
Said’s misleading use of quotes shows the problem with his work in microcosm. On a broad view, Said fundamentally misrepresented his subject.
Said took care of micro details and he presented the broadband conclusions too.
To label former misleading and latter a misrepresentation is monumental claim. Can he back it with evidence?
In challenging Said’s first alleged “dogma” of Orientalism, which ascribes all virtue to the West and its opposite to the Orient, Varisco says that Said is describing “a stereotype that at the time of his writing would have been similarly rejected by the vast majority of those [Said] lumps together as Orientalists.” And the British writer Robert Irwin, whose book Dangerous Knowledge offers a thorough history of Orientalism and also a rebuttal of Said, notes that, historically, “there has been a marked tendency for Orientalists to be anti-imperialists, as their enthusiasm for Arab or Persian or Turkish culture often went hand in hand with a dislike of seeing those people defeated and dominated by the Italians, Russians, British, or French.” (Like Varisco, Irwin makes clear that he is no opponent of Said’s political position, but is offended by his travesty of scholarship.)
This is but a small instance of a large methodological problem that invalidates Said’s work entirely, namely, his selectivity with evidence. Said made clear that his indictment was aimed not at this or that individual but at “Orientalists” per se, which, as we have seen, was a category in which he included all Westerners who said anything about the Orient. Thus, he wrote, “all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact of empire.” And: “No one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism.”
Why did Said choose to paint with such a broad brush? Because he knew that if he had asserted merely that some Westerners wrote pejoratively or condescendingly or misleadingly about the East while others did not, his argument would have lost much of its provocation. It would have demanded clarification about the relative numbers or influence of the two groups, about variations within the groups, about reciprocal attitudes among Easterners toward the West. Above all, it would have drawn the inevitable retort: so what? Was it news that some individuals favored their own societies over others?
The only way Said could make his generalized indictment seem plausible was to select whatever examples fit it and leave out the rest. When challenged on his omissions, Said replied with hauteur that he was under no obligation to include “every Orientalist who ever lived.” But of course the real issue was whether the ones he included made a representative sample (and whether he presented them faithfully).
The most logical thing to do in this case would be to do a better sampling than said and draw counter conclusion. This is a game that has been already won by Said. How many scholars or worth, might and mettle can take us a task of such gigantic proportions? None. Said might not have been the best academician of his generation but he certainly was one of the best. Any any good academician will weigh his options - is the effort worth it? A bad academician, like the present critic, would not be up to the task while a good one will not have it on his mind - the game was up in 1978. The best conclusion an academician can hope for is that some orientalists were good enough to be not patronizing. This is is not a very attractive proposition as a reward. This is an insignificant footnote. What is worse that one is not likely to come across such a species for orientalism belongs to those times when the west was having a ball at the expense of the orient and people thinking impartially about the orient is possible only in most wild imagination. Yet let the present critic take up this unpromising task.

These methodological failings were mostly lost in the dazzle. What made the book electrifying was that Said had found a new way to condemn the West for its most grievous sins: racism and the subjugation of others.
What methodological problems? Well said himself mentioned the methodological problems. Should one use micro-analysis and lose track of overall contours informing the field? Or use the overall conclusions and a polemic devoid of supporting microscopic evidence? He hit upon the brilliant solution - use personal circumstances to navigate through a few centuries and do a sampling of both. Thus he uses geography and he uses history and he uses culture and he uses particular orientalists and extracts a discourse that, though ugly, is intricately woven and self-supporting and detrimental to the subject - the orient. people finding methodological problems perhaps are hoping that readers will accept their thesis without reading the original book.

This danger can not be overlooked. The book Orientalism is a painful reading because of the sheer pugnacity of the construct, excruciating tenacity, diabolical perseverance and obnoxious gay abandon of the discourse.
With great originality, Said even extended the indictment through the millennia, a depiction that drew a protest from Sadiq al-Azm, a Syrian philosopher of Marxist bent (and one of that country’s most admired dissidents). Wrote Azm:
Said . . . trac[es] the origins of Orientalism all the way back to Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Dante. In other words, Orientalism is not really a thoroughly modern phenomenon, but is the natural product of an ancient and almost irresistible European bent of mind to misrepresent other . . . cultures . . . in favor of Occidental self-affirmation, domination, and ascendency.
We can again summarize the  accusation : Said did not leave any scope even in the past to hide face and absolve the west of responsibility for what they did to the orient. That the west has a long standing fear and hence antagonism should be taken an argument against the orientalist attitude and not against the postman - in this case Said.
Azm may have thought this wrong, but it was heady stuff. If we are talking about a mentality that is continuous before and after Christ then we are talking less about European culture, which is in large measure defined by Christianity, than about the European race. Thus did Orientalism fit the temper of a time when it was widely asserted that all white people were inherently bigoted, and “encounter groups” met at campuses and workplaces so that whites could discover and confront their inner racist. And nowhere was the evidence of this white evil laid out in greater depth and seeming sophistication than in Said’s pages.
The problem with any narrative that begins at pathetic foundations, as this critique does, is that it can only get worse. Above paragraph is a nonconsequential insertion of text hoping that may be some reader will find some point in this that can be used against Said. To begin with this is pathetic. At the end it is dishonest. A dubious improvement if  it was one.
In this atmosphere, wrote the New York Times in its obituary for Said, “Orientalism established Dr. Said as a figure of enormous influence in American and European universities, a hero to many, especially younger faculty and graduate students on the left for whom that book became an intellectual credo and the founding document of what came to be called postcolonial studies.”
Yet another cribbing. No one accused Said for being a leftist. Indeed he made a very non-leftist claim by identifying a very serious lapse on part of Karl Marx. If the left still took to it as a credo then it a tribute to Said's erudition and  courage and honesty of the leftists. That someone should be holding it against said or his thesis is at best a betrayal of integrity.
It was not only American leftists who seized on the book. The Guardian, in its own obituary, observed that:
Orientalism appeared at an opportune time, enabling upwardly mobile academics from non-western countries (many of whom came from families who had benefited from colonialism) to take advantage of the mood of political correctness it helped to engender by associating themselves with “narratives of oppression,” creating successful careers out of transmitting, interpreting and debating representations of the non-western “other.”
This is yet another disingenuous complain. Upwardly mobile non-western academics had already made their mark, in spite of colonialism. A residual orientalist taint is a blot on this article.
Orientalism, added the Guardian, “is credited with helping to change the direction of several disciplines,” a thought echoed by supporters and detractors alike. Admiringly, Stuart Schaar, a professor emeritus of Middle East history at Brooklyn College, wrote that “the academic community has been transformed and the field of literary criticism has been revolutionized as a result of his legacy.”
Clearly this is pure praise for Said's work. Somehow we are supposed to conclude something negative about him from these type of quotations. everytime he goes it becomes worse.
Without ever relinquishing his claim to personify a “glamour-garlanded ideal of ‘outsiderdom,’” as one disillusioned reviewer of a series of lectures Said delivered in London put it, Said and his disciples took power in academia, as reflected in the astonishing number of courses that assigned his books and the frequency with which they were cited. Varisco observed that “a generation of students across disciplines has grown up with limited challenges to the polemical charge by Said that scholars who study the Middle East and Islam still do so institutionally through an interpretive sieve that divides a superior West from an inferior East.” The new Saidian orthodoxy became so utterly dominant in the Middle East Studies Association, and so unfriendly to dissenting voices, that in 2007 Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami took the lead in forming an alternative professional organization, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa.
A 1978 book is being termed as Saidian orthodoxy. The American phase of orientalism, the neo-colonial era, is just coming to its end . This can not be the era of Saidian orthodoxy. That American academia accepted Said's proposition leads to only two conclusions - the decisiveness and conclusive nature of his thesis. The rest is bickering and crying over spilled milk.

Bernard Lewis is still  with us. He was engaged by Said personally and everybody can read those exchanges. It left Lewis badly exposed. He is the person infamous for coining the phrase clash of civilizations made more infamous by late Samuel P. Huntington. Late Fouad Ajami though valiantly took on Huntington but his overall disposition was of a self-hating oriental. less said about such people better it is.
Said was fond of invoking the mantra of “speaking truth to power.” This was an easy boast for someone who opted to live in America, or for that matter to live anywhere, and make a career of denouncing the West and Israel. But while a daring Promethean in the West, Said was more careful closer to native ground. Habib Malik, a historian at the Lebanese American University and a cousin of Said’s, recalls hearing him deliver a talk at the American University of Beirut: “On one occasion he blasted Saddam Hussein and a number of other Arab dictators but stopped short of mentioning [then Syrian dictator] Hafez Assad for obvious reasons: the Syrian mukhabarat [secret police] in Beirut would have picked him up right after the lecture!”
The reviewer has injected Israel for the first time in the narrative. Said was a master craftsman. His analysis of the issue was so dispassionate that this introduction of Israel merely bolsters the pathetic nature of this article. (Yet he goes on and on.) If US boasts of freedom of speech then how does it become a vice to use it, especially if the user, like said, is an Arab? Then should said have spoken against Asad and got arrested? That is a diabolical device to get rid of a person who had shown mirror to the west.
Said’s career, the deviousness and posturing and ineffable vanity of it, would have been mostly an academic matter if he had not been so successful in redefining Arabs and Muslims as the moral equivalent of blacks and in casting Israel as the racist white oppressor.
There is racism and there is colonialism, yes both exist as of now. No two ways about any of them.
Four years after the UN General Assembly had declared Zionism to be a form of racism, Said gave this same idea a highbrow reiteration. Israel did not give Arabs the same right of immigration as Jews, he said mockingly, because they are “‘less developed.’”
Yes Israel is an oppressor. Was all this an attempt to absolve Israel of her crimes?

By this time following has become clear, if it it was still not so for some people. The west had an unfair control of the orient and moreover it did not admit it. Every assertion to that effect could be refuted by the entrenched western academia. Said's Orientalism changed all that. yet there are people like the present critic who would not give up on old ways - most due to lack of understanding.
Decades after Orientalism was published, Said explained that Israel had been its covert target all along:
I don’t think I would have written that book had I not been politically associated with a struggle. The struggle of Arab and Palestinian nationalism is very important to that book. Orientalism is not meant to be an abstract account of some historical formation but rather a part of the liberation from such stereotypes and such domination of my own people, whether they are Arabs, Muslims, or Palestinians.
Again a remark in bad faith. Said's only crime is that he successfully intellectually defended his people. That every single of those people are still physically still abused should be taken as an argument against the case that present critic is trying to make with no success whatsoever.
Said had not acknowledged such an agenda in the pages of Orientalism or at the time of its publication, although this ideological subtext could be discerned in his ferocity toward Bernard Lewis, who, observed Irwin, “was not really attacked by Said for being a bad scholar (which he is not), but for being a supporter of Zionism (which he is).”
This reviewer does not understand the book Orientalism. My apologies for the repetition. In that book said very explicitly mentions personal circumstances being behind the writing of as well as formation of the thesis.
It was also implicit in the identity of those Said exempted from his generalization about Westerners.
If he is exempting some people then he must not be accused of stereotyping.
In the concluding pages of Orientalism, he allowed that a very few “decolonializing” voices could be heard in the West, and in a footnote he offered just two American examples, Noam Chomsky and MERIP, the Middle East Research and Information Project. Chomsky of course is not a Middle East expert or someone who writes often on the Middle East, but he had already carved out a place for himself as the leading Jewish voice of vituperation against Israel.
Noam Chomsky does speak about  these issues.
MERIP, a New Left group formed to cheer Palestinian guerrillas and other Arab revolutionaries, was so single-minded in its devotion to this cause that it praised the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics for causing “a boost in morale among Palestinians” and “halt[ing]” moves “for a ‘settlement’ between Israel and the Arab regimes.”
Criticizing Israel is a taboo in US and hence the world intelligentsia. What said did is no disentangle the subject matter from this construct. the western perfidy, among other things, consists in asserting that so what even if you are talking sense you after all is anti-Zionist. Hence discredited. Unfortunately for them the nuanced analysis in the Orientalism took away that pleasure by sheer dispassionate separation of orientalist paradigm from the, today, 68 years old problem of a homeland for Palestine people.
Although Said’s assault on the Jewish state was thus initially camouflaged, it was devastatingly effective, as his stance on Arab/Israel questions came to dominate Middle East studies. The UCLA historian of the Middle East Nikki Keddie, whose sympathetic work on revolutionary Iran had won Said’s praise in his book Covering Islam, commented:
There has been a tendency in the Middle East field to adopt the word “Orientalism” as a generalized swear-word essentially referring to people who take the “wrong” position on the Arab-Israeli dispute or to people who are judged too “conservative.” It has nothing to do with whether they are good or not good in their disciplines.
This is certainly a surprising assertion by Nikki Keddie. But was said himself guilty of that? An academician of that stature will not assert such an absurd claim.
His reputation made by the success of Orientalism, Said devoted much of the rest of his career to more direct advocacy of the Arab/Muslim/Palestinian cause, starting with the publication of The Question of Palestine in 1979, by which time he was already a member of the PLO’s top official body, the Palestinian National Council.
What said accomplished in the Orientalism is a life time achievement. That he went on about doing something more than writing a mighty book is tribute to his energies as well as commitment. That Said used his reputation in favour of his people is again a complain lacking in integrity. Why should a person not use his abilities for a just cause?
The book was a full-throated polemic. The Jews were the aggressors; and the Palestinians their victims—on all counts and with little nuance.
This is plain silly argument. Israeli persecution of Palestinian people is stark reality and gross injustice. Polemics is not only the first possible reaction but the only rhetoric option in such a case.
Even on the matter of terrorism, Said asserted, “There is nothing in Palestinian history, absolutely nothing at all to rival the record of Zionist terror.”
Another truism from a person who not only knows his issue but happens to be a man who is intimately connected with it. his involvement is personal.
Said proclaimed himself “horrified” by the terrorist acts that “Palestinian men and women . . . were driven to do.” But all blame ultimately rested with Israel, which had “literally produced, manufactured . . . the ‘terrorist.’”
If the truth be told the terrorist label does not look so easy to slap on Palestinian people any more. They are fighting for their very legitimate rights.

The reviewer by now has jumped from Orientalism to the so called terrorism. Anyone who is concerned with Said's work on former might feel like disconnecting now. i shall continue along with the reviewer hoping that at the end of this laboured review I shall be done with him once and for all.
He wrote, with what even a New York Times reviewer called “stunning disingenuousness,” that “at least since the early seventies, the PLO had avoided and condemned terror.” These words appeared just one year after the organization’s bloodiest attack on Israeli civilians, the March 1978 “coastal road massacre,” in which thirty-eight civilians, thirteen of them children, were randomly gunned down, with scores of others injured—and not by any “renegade” faction but by the PLO’s mainstream group, Fatah. (Said himself was already a member of the PLO’s governing body when this “action” was carried out.)
The insinuation is that said himself was responsible for some terrorist acts. If there was even a remote iota of truth in that Said would have been terminated by the Mossad in the US itself - so near complete is the Zionist control on that society. In the beginning the reviewer was miserable and now he has become vicious. Strange level of current US academics.
Said worked hard to solidify the myth that for years Arafat had tried to make peace and been rebuffed: “On occasion after occasion the PLO stated its willingness to accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza,” citing resolutions of the Palestinian National Council in 1974 and 1977. This was true, but these resolutions did not convey, as Said went on disingenuously to claim, “an implicit recognition of Israel.” Rather, they envisioned a strategy in which Palestinians would form a government in the West Bank and Gaza, in the event that international diplomacy afforded them this opportunity, not as a step toward peace but with the declared intent of using this territory as a base to fight on to “liberate” the rest of Palestine, i.e., Israel proper. As the PNC’s 1974 resolution stated: “The PLO will struggle against any plan for the establishment of a Palestinian entity the price of which is recognition [of Israel], conciliation, secure borders, and renunciation of the national rights of our people, its right to return, and self-determination on its national soil.”
The reviewer is disingenuous. What Palestian people were opposing was a Palestine with Zionist occupation. In what way is that different from status quo?
In 1988, a decade after Said’s book appeared, the PLO did renounce terror and imply its willingness to acquiesce in Israel’s existence, albeit equivocally. These two pivotal concessions were clearly avowed only in the 1993 Oslo Accords. When Arafat finally took this indispensable step toward peace, one might have expected Said, who had been claiming that this had happened avant la lettre, to praise him. Instead, Said denounced his hero. Arafat, he complained, had “sold his people into enslavement,” and he called Oslo—in which Israel and the PLO recognized each other and pledged to hammer out a two-state settlement—an “instrument of Palestinian surrender.” Back in Arafat’s terrorist days, Said had seen him as “a man of genius” and said that “his people . . . loved him.” (Indeed, “Arafat and the Palestinian will . . . were in a sense interchangeable,” he once gushed.) But signing this agreement with Israel had, at a stroke, transformed Arafat, in Said’s eyes, into “a strutting dictator.” Arafat and his circle had become a bunch of “losers and has-beens” who “should step aside.”
Said himself adopted a new position on the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Arafat did not live to see the final solution therefore it is meaningless to go over these details.
No longer did he envision a two-state solution, as he had professed to do back when the idea was theoretical, since the main Palestinian organization (on whose board he sat) was not prepared to suffer the existence of Israel in any shape or form. Now, however, he sought instead “to devise a means where the two peoples can live together in one nation as equals.”
This was not a proposal to be taken seriously. In Israel, large numbers of Arabs did live freely but not in complete equality, a fact over which Said often protested. In the Arab states, many Jews had once lived but nearly all had been expelled. In other words, Said’s new formula was nothing more than a fancy way of opposing the only genuine possibility of peace.
This bitter ender’s position was, of course, phrased in terms chosen to sound idealistic. In that sense it was characteristic of Said’s oeuvre and of the movement of which he was such a critical part.
It is clear that the Zionist paradigm has not fooled the Palestianian people. What is worse that the world is waking upto the unjust reality - the miserable condition to which the Palestinians have been reduced under Zionist occupation. Zionism was not a viable idea from day one and now its dangers in reality have become clear to the whole world. If Palestinians have not yet got their homeland then it is a clear indication that the colonial creators of Israel remain successful in their design till today.
Leftism is the stance of those who aspire to make the world a better place, according to their own view, through political action. For roughly a century its modal idea was Marxism, which identified the proletariat as the engine of redemption, a choice that resonated with the age-old Christian belief that the meek shall inherit the earth. As the twentieth century wore on, however, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela displaced Joe Hill, Mother Bloor, and Henry Wallace as objects of veneration. People of color and strugglers against colonial oppression stirred the hearts of idealists more than leaders of strikes and fighters for a fair day’s pay. Once, Zionism had tapped into that older leftism, seeing itself as a workers’ movement. But instead in the latter twentieth century—and in considerable part thanks to the impact of Edward Said—it became redefined as a movement of white people competing for land with people of color. This transformation meant that from then on the left would be aligned overwhelmingly and ardently against Israel.
Blah, blah, blah.
Joshua Muravchik, a fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and a frequent contributor to World Affairs, is completing a book on the anti-Israel lobby, from which this article is adapted.
Unfortunately Zionism still lives on.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

A Mode to Thank Allah SWT

I know my acts of thanklessness far outstrip any words of your praise that I may conjure up but then who am I to live up to the level your benevolence demands when even your Prophets (AS) can hardly measure up to them.

Didn't beloved Prophet (SAW) tell the mother of believers Hazrat Ayesha (RA) that he who accounting begins is doomed?

I know I have every possible shortcoming that one can think of but I have deeply fallen into the thinking that if you gave me birth in a family that follows the Deen of your beloved Prophet (SAW) then I have ultimately to fear nothing.

I do get perturbed by the trials I face on the daily basis but in that also I have chosen to believe that this all is for driving me closer to you.

In know that my beloved Prophet (SAW) smiled a lot. From there I have started hoping that it will not be my fate that will wipe out the smile from his face.

When you tried our Prophet (SAW) it was was most painful trial but the tears we have shed on his trials will be acceptable to you for we accept all of your injunctions and we deny no part of your Deen.

And then you told me about Deoband. In the glitter of this modern world these villagers have kept the flame of faith alight. Will it be in vain that you brought me to them? These self-less servants of your Deen have been raising the curtains from the reality that the materialism has cast upon the pristine teachings of the your Rasool (SAW). I am deceiving myself that if you showed them to me it only means that I will be in their company on the Day of Judgement.

You sent me to this world in the Ummah of beloved Prophet Muhammed (SAW). This has lead me to cheat myself into believing that this blessing will not be my last one. This is the blessing that other Prophets (AS) wanted but was denied to them except for Hazrat Isa (AS). I know you will not crack the most cruel joke on me by sending me in his Ummah but denying me an accounting in his company.

When I write these words I see that nearly all signs of the end times are in place. May be I shall see Mehdi (AS) but even if I don't I know he is very close by. I am only scared that this piling on of blessings upon each other is too good but it is nothing as compared to your Mercy that knows no bound.

So if we are in a tight corner in India then so what? We are in the Hizb of your Prophet (SAW) and we know that you are with us for that is your Hizb.

If the Muslims of the land of Amir Kabir Shah Hamadani (RA) are being tortured on the daily basis we know this is certainly the price we have to pay for our lack of commitment to your Deen.

If we are being killed mercilessly in Palestine I know your help is very near. We are weak and in no way can deliver the rights of your deen but you Mercy is boundless.

If Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya are destroyed then it certainly is because of our ignoring your Deen.

If we are ineffective in the rest of the world then that too is because of our shortcomings. You are Most Kind, do this favour to us and make our hearts strong against our enemies. Remove the love of this world from our hearts and from our hearts remove the fear of death. Include us amongst those who love you intensely.

Thursday, October 1, 2015

Definition of Evil

According to M. Scott Peck, an evil person:

1. Is consistently self deceiving, with the intent of avoiding guilt and maintaining a self image of perfection

2. Deceives others as a consequence of their own self deception

3. Projects his or her evils and sins onto very specific targets while being apparently normal with everyone else.

4. Commonly hates with the pretense of love, for the purposes of self deception as much as deception of others

5. Abuses political & emotional power ("the imposition of one's will upon others by overt or covert coercion".)

6. Maintains a high level of respectability, and lies incessantly in order to do so

7. Is consistent in his or her sins. Evil persons are characterized not so much by the magnitude of their sins, but by their consistency of destructiveness.

8. Is unable to think from the viewpoint of their victim

9. Has a covert intolerance to criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury

10. Most evil people realize the evil deep within themselves but are unable to tolerate the pain of introspection or admit to themselves that they are evil. Thus, they constantly run away from their evil by putting themselves in a position of moral superiority and putting the focus of evil on others.

Evil is an extreme form of a character disorder.